(January 10, 2019 at 1:55 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote:(January 9, 2019 at 5:38 pm)Belaqua Wrote: To me the orchestra analogy doesn't work because a single note and a symphony are ontologically the same; the difference is complexity. But an electrochemical event and an experience are not, in my view, ontologically the same.
It's true that there are emergent properties in the world that come about due to complexity, but I haven't seen it demonstrated yet that consciousness is one of those things. Some people think it is. If you have some argument for this I will read it.
Not just complexity, but relationships. Single notes of an orchestra piece may be ontologically the same, but the timing and relationships between them over time are not. Those are new properties which only exist in the full piece. That's where the music exists, and that music is similar to the emergent property of consciousness in that sense. The music doesn't exist without the timing and relationships between the notes. I will describe this in more detail in my book report about the human brain.
Thanks for remaining reasonable and patient. I guess I'm having a hard time articulating my thoughts well enough to be understood. That's part of the reason I'm working on a longer presentation. I will add this much, however: another way to express one of my main points is that the hard problem of consciousness isn't really about how consciousness arose, but about how life arose. The latter is what created subjects from objects. Thus my comment that consciousness is necessarily an experience of bodies, and that it couldn't exist without them. That wasn't intended as a tautology.
I've read the first chapter and a half of the Gazzaniga book, and I'm impressed!
Often enough, when a scientist starts a book with a brief summary of the history of his field, it makes me cringe. Especially if the subject is one that has bumped up against religion, what we get is ideology disguised as fact. And the more popular a book, the more likely this is to happen. (Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson, I'm looking at you.) But Gazzaniga gives the impression of being fair and knowledgable. Both the historical facts and the philosophy are clear and accurate, as far as I can tell.
(There is one point I'd ask him about if I were in his class: I have on hand here reproductions of diagrams from a European translation of Avicenna, made in about 1300 AD, and it clearly shows thought happening in the brain. It even shows that different parts of the brain have different thought functions. Avicenna thought that deep memory is at the back of the brain, which is why we tend to tip our heads back when we're trying to recall something. Gazzaniga seems to say that locating thought in the brain was later than this date. But obviously, he couldn't include everything or the book would be a million pages long.)
So he's made a very good impression so far. I'm looking forward to the rest. Thank you for pointing out the book to me.
